by Von Hardesty
Baikonur offered a secure and optimal location to catapult rockets and their payloads into orbit. The vast desert region around the rail stop was indeed remote and hidden from any major population center. As it soon became known, rockets could be launched, tracked, and recovered without hindrance. The southern latitude, as far south as any of the other Soviet states, allowed planners to take some advantage from the added velocity of being closer to Earth’s Equator, where Earth rotates west-east the fastest.14 Baikonur replaced the older Soviet test range at Kapustin Yar (near present-day Volgagrad), where the V-2 rocket technology had been tested, along with the R-5 missile. Baikonur would assume historical significance as the locale for the Sputnik launches, the lunar probes, and the early Soviet manned space missions. Today, the fabled cosmodrome remains at the epicenter of the modern Russian space program—the home for latter-day Proton, Tsyklon, and Zenit space launch vehicles.
In April 1955, Colonel Engineer (later General) Georgiy M. Shubnikov assumed overall leadership of the project. Shubnikov had served as the chief of the 130th Directorate for Engineering in the Ministry of Defense. His task was a stern one, given the enormous administrative burdens, and he worked assiduously to meet all the exacting deadlines. The entire project was gargantuan in scale, requiring an intense schedule of work and constant attention to quality control. He directed a steady stream of building materials, engineers, and workers to the site. Shubnikov was assisted by the talented and hardworking Colonel Ilya M. Gurevich, who would spend no less than 20 years of his life in this assignment, only retiring in 1975 owing to declining health. If Korolev held the position of Chief Designer, Gurevich might claim the informal title of “Chief Builder” of Baikonur.15
When Shubnikov and his party arrived at Tyuratam, they encountered a forlorn scene: The obscure rail stop consisted of merely a water tower for steam engines, several cottages for railroad personnel, and a cluster of mud huts occupied by local Kazakhs. On all sides of this small oasis, endless desert stretched to the horizon.16
Anyone assigned to the Baikonur construction site faced extremes in weather. Aleksei Leonov, the first Soviet cosmonaut to walk in space, remembered vividly the brutal swings of the desert climate. Each new season offered its own measure of punishment. “Hurricane-strength winds reduced temperatures to below–40°F in winter,” he recalled. “Once the snow melted, the incessant high winds hurled sand against the buildings with such force that, although we jammed towels against doors and windows, fine dust and sand got in everywhere: in our clothes, eyes, and food.” At the height of summer, Leonov told of temperatures soaring to the range of 104-122°F, which forced him and his fellow cosmonauts to wrap themselves in wet sheets as a means to lower body temperature. This remedy, however, had a grim outcome: The moisture attracted insects into their shelter. Scorpions, snakes, and poisonous spiders also abounded. Leonov recalled how death could lurk everywhere in the harsh environs of Baikonur: “I once witnessed a technician, a young captain, being bitten on the neck by a spider. He collapsed and died within minutes. There was nothing we could do.”17 Leonov’s experiences echoed the ordeal Goddard had endured in the deserts of New Mexico and, to a lesser extent, those faced by military and NASA workers at Cape Canaveral in the 1950s.
Baikonur evolved only slowly to the point where it could offer any creature comforts to its resident workers. In its untouched aspect, the desert region possessed a certain beauty: “In early spring,” Chertok observed, “tiny yellow tulips on the thick clay crust covering the surface were a delight to the eyes.” Travel by trucks was possible, but the resulting damage to the engines and undercarriages of these vehicles was often severe. Also, the trucks created deep ruts over the landscape. The first waves of workers to reach the site were housed in prefabricated barracks and wooden houses. The work was exhausting and the living conditions remained primitive during the first two years of incessant work.18 In the early days, soldiers often were forced to live in dugouts and tents. The construction of a wooden cinema hall and creation of a park added a much-welcomed civilizing touch.
Slowly a town took shape along the Syr Darya River, named Desyataya ploshchadka (“Site Number 10”). The town plan called for apartments, a data processing center, administrative buildings, housing units, a department store, and other stores for essential commodities, a hospital, a heating plant, and a power plant. Water in movable tanks was shipped into the settlement until a proper water system from the nearby Syr Darya River had been constructed. A grid of streets and avenues, each lined with newly planted trees, gave Site Number 10 the look of a real town. Residents were housed in typical Soviet-style apartment blocks, erected in five-to seven-floor buildings. Schools appeared once the town was prepared to house families rather than brigades of soldiers and workers. To supply the daunting tasks of construction, a cement plant was set up next to this residential precinct. Later the town would be renamed Leninsk in Soviet times and then, after the fall of communism, Boris Yeltsin renamed the space city Baikonur. By the 1980s, the town boasted a population of more than 120,000 residents.19
The initial launch site for the R-7 rocket began to take shape in September 1955. The pad acquired the name “stadium,” and it became the locale for a series of historic launches, including the Sputnik 1 artificial satellite and the first manned orbital mission by Yuri Gagarin. The construction of this pivotal launch pad required the pouring of more than a million cubic yards of concrete. A control bunker was built 218 yards from the pad, a secure bastion for rocket technicians that was reputed to be properly concrete-encased to withstand a nuclear attack. This site was later renamed the Gagarin Complex.20
In 1958, a second launch site, named Site 31, was set up for testing of the R-7 missile.21 Both launch pads were used for space missions in the 1960s. Other launch pads were developed over time, some massive enough to accommodate the Soviets’ largest rockets. Baikonur remained an operational missile base, where the latest ICBM designs were tested, beginning with the R-16 in the late 1950s. Over time three launch complexes (left, center, and right in common parlance) were allocated for the use of the major designers: Sergei Korolev, Vladimir Chelomei, and Mikhail Yangel. The center complex was devoted to projects from Korolev’s OKB-1 group, a sequence of remarkable and ambitious projects that extended from the R-7 through the Vostok to the N-1 rocket intended to take cosmonauts to the moon. The Soviets built a massive assembly building at Baikonur that rivaled in size the Vertical Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, where America’s massive Saturn V moon rockets were assembled. Linked to Baikonur was a network of control and tracking stations, all run by the Soviet military and positioned at strategic points across the vast continental expanse of the Soviet Union.
The United States suspected that the Soviets had built the massive Baikonur facility, but it took time and effort to get a clear focus on the new facility. First, American intelligence learned of the construction of the top-secret facility in the years 1955-1956, and then took steps to photograph it. The only maps available to the CIA at the time were old German military maps fashioned from aerial reconnaissance in World War II. Hence, the U-2 aerial photography was deemed essential and it was pursued in a systematic fashion. By the summer of 1957, U-2 spy planes had taken the first high-altitude photos of the emerging cosmodrome. This concerted effort at aerial photography was not without risk—or consequences for the tense stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Francis Gary Powers, flying a U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory in May 1960, was shot down during a mission to capture images of the Baikonur complex. Later, reconnaissance satellites offered American photograph interpreters more detailed data on space activities at Baikonur. In December 1967, an American reconnaissance satellite photographed the construction of Complex J, the new spaceport for the massive N-1 rocket to carry Russian cosmonauts to the moon.22
Life at Baikonur was punctuated with more than one tragic disaster. On October 24, 1960, the experimental R-16 ICBM, a rocket designed by M
ikhail Yangel, exploded on the launch pad at the cosmodrome. Several hundred soldiers and technicians had gathered at the launch pad for the occasion. Marshall Nedelin, the head of the Soviet Union’s Strategic Rocket Forces, decided to observe the launch close to the rocket, notwithstanding the warnings he received concerning the inherent dangers of being in such proximity to an untested rocket. Nedelin dismissed such advice, reportedly saying, “What’s there to be afraid of? Am I not an officer?” His bravado led to his death. The power and intense heat of the explosion obliterated most of the victims. Marshal Nedelin’s remains were identified only because he had worn a distinctive badge. The exact number of casualties in this catastrophic explosion would be a matter of speculation, with estimates of about 130 personnel lost.23
A second tragedy befell the Soviet space program in March 1961, not in Baikonur, but in Moscow at the Institute of Aviation and Space Medicine. Cosmonaut trainee Valentin Bondarenko was burned to death in an accidental fire in an isolation chamber. His untimely end cast a pall over the manned space program at Baikonur.24
The Baikonur cosmodrome continued to propel the Soviet space program forward in the 1960s with its Vostok series. Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 executed a dramatic rendezvous in orbit. From Baikonur, the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, flew in space in June 1963. In 1964, the Soviets launched three cosmonauts aloft into orbit in the Voskhod mission, another dramatic and high-risk endeavor to remain ahead of the curve on “space firsts.” On the Voskhod 2 mission, Leonov became the first human to “walk” in space. By 1965, just months before his death, Korolev had launched the new Soyuz series to experiment further with rendezvous and docking techniques. The ill-fated work on the N-1, the Soviet parallel lunar rocket to the Saturn V, occupied center stage at Baikonur in the late 1960s, even as the NASA Apollo program gained momentum in the race to be the first to land humans on the moon.
The extraordinary Baikonur facility remained at the epicenter of the Russian space program as it evolved in the post-Apollo context. The Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975, the Mir space station, and the one-time pilotless launch of the Buran (similar in design to the American space shuttle) in 1988 constituted important milestones that defined the capabilities of the Russian space program. Hard times visited Baikonur in the wake of the fall of the Communist regime in 1991. By 1995, funding dropped to just 10 percent of the 1989 level. Conditions at Baikonur worsened with a steep decline in the standard of living. A major riot occurred in February 1992. In time, though, conditions improved. By the turn of 21st century, Baikonur had regained some of its former stature. No less important, the legendary cosmodrome ceased to be a sealed-off domain. Westerners now routinely tour Baikonur, even participating in joint ventures—a sharp contrast to the pioneering era of the 1960s.25
FIRST DAYS AT CAPE CANAVERAL
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the Army’s White Sands test range had been an ideal setting for the American rocket program to mature. As time passed, however, there was increasing interest in alternative test facilities for both civilian and military rocketry. Moreover, the program at White Sands proved to be limited in nature. The city of El Paso, Texas, and the United States–Mexico border lay little more than 50 miles south of the test site; moreover, given the range of rockets, the test site was miniscule, being little more than 100 miles long, north to south.
The perils associated with a small test range became evident on the evening of May 29, 1947, when a V-2 lifted off from the southern part of the range on a planned northbound trajectory. Soon after liftoff, the rocket veered off course, turning south toward Mexico. The abrupt change in direction was caused by a malfunctioning gyroscope in the rocket’s guidance system. Now wildly off course, the V-2 flew over El Paso, crossed the Mexican border, and crashed just outside a cemetery near the city of Juarez. The time of the ill-fated launch coincided with a fiesta in the Mexican city, but the explosion—leaving a crater 30 feet deep and 50 feet wide—did not kill or injure any of the local inhabitants. The United States quickly sent formal apologies to the Mexican government. Officials, including Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State George Marshall, called White Sands to express concern. When American technicians reached the crash site, though, they discovered that entrepreneurial Mexicans had already set up a souvenir stand to sell “authentic” missile fragments to tourists.26
Despite these mishaps, from its creation in late 1945, White Sands was a vital and productive center for the Army’s missile program. Wernher von Braun and his team and others made substantial gains in the development of powerful rockets and missiles, a research program that grew out of the rocket technology first developed by Germany in World War II. The effort served not only military but scientific ends as well. From White Sands, a series of sounding rockets probed the upper atmosphere. These pioneering launches allowed for a new scientific understanding of near space. Moreover, the resulting spectacular photography of the Earth clearly showed its curvature and topographical features.
In the fall of 1946, the Pentagon began a search for a new test range, to be called the Joint Long Range Proving Ground. The quest for a new test site was justified as necessary to accommodate the range of a whole new generation of missiles. The underlying purpose was to build an effective ICBM, and such a missile required an expansive arena for testing. Several sites were considered seriously—in locales as diverse as Washington State and Florida. Even as the site selection committee prepared to make its final choice, the V-2 from White Sands made its ill-fated crash in Mexico. That incident led to elimination of a California launch site, which would have placed missile testing too close to Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, a prospect unacceptable to the Mexican government. The proposed Washington State site was rejected due to its poor weather and isolation. Other candidate sites also fell by the wayside for various reasons, setting the stage for the selection of a 15,000-acre tract of land on Cape Canaveral, Florida, located midway between Jacksonville and Miami. This site was part of a barrier island off Florida’s Atlantic coast. The Cape Canaveral site was isolated and remote, except for an abandoned naval air station and an old lighthouse constructed in 1848. Spanish nobleman Ponce de Leon is credited by historians as having been the first European to explore the area—then occupied by Native Americans—in 1513. The region was characterized as rustic and barren, overgrown with thick grass and sharp-edged palmetto scrub along with miles and miles of sand. In the absence of human habitation, the region was populated by numerous scorpions, ants, alligators, snakes, horseflies, and intense clouds of mosquitoes.27
Cape Canaveral had attributes that contributed mightily to its selection. As real-estate agents often note, the three most important factors to consider when looking at property are, “location, location, and location.” In at least three essential ways, Cape Canaveral offered just that. First, it was ideally placed to take advantage of the Earth’s rotational speed. By firing a satellite-carrying missile eastward—that is, in the same direction that Earth is rotating—the rocket gained a head start on achieving orbital speed. Second, Cape Canaveral was relatively close to the Equator, where the planet’s rotational speed is greatest. Third, once a rocket was fired out over the Atlantic, headed generally southeast, nothing—save a handful of small islands, mainly in the Caribbean—stood in its way for 5,000 miles. Those islands, stretching from the Grand Bahamas to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, made perfect locations for tracking stations to follow the missiles’ course. The U.S. government negotiated with Great Britain for rights to place the tracking stations on the Grand Bahamas, Grand Turk Island, and Ascension Island. In addition, Cape Canaveral was essentially flat, making runway construction relatively simple. On von Braun’s first visit, the Cape reminded him of his former missile test site at Peenemünde, on the Baltic Sea. Both sites, he noted, were isolated and inaccessible.28
BUILDING A WORLD-CLASS TEST RANGE
President Truman signed legislation formally creating the Joint Long Range P
roving Ground in May 1949, and then placed the operational control of the test facility under the newly independent U.S. Air Force. Actual construction began in May 1950. Those who worked on the new test facility would encounter real hardships: Before serious construction could begin, for example, a massive mosquito extermination effort, including aerial spraying, was undertaken. The location was primitive, as a Douglas Aircraft Company chief engineer later recalled of his visit to the planned site of a Thor missile launch pad: “We climbed on a bulldozer. Some old Florida guy drove us out there (on a paved road surrounded by marshes and wild scrub), with water moccasins falling off the blade. He said, ‘This is where the pad’s gonna be.’”29 Besides an access road into the Cape, the Army Corps of Engineers, working with private contactors, first constructed a 100-foot-wide concrete launch pad, which was completely surrounded by sand. Known as Pad 3, the primitive support facilities for the Bumper V-2 rocket included a control-center blockhouse, a mere 300 feet from the pad, made from “plywood and protected by walls of sandbags.” (By contrast, the White Sands test range blockhouse boasted a 27-foot-thick concrete roof.) The Bumper V-2 was composed of a V-2 topped with a WAC-Corporal research rocket, creating the United States’ first two-stage space vehicle.30
July 24, 1950, dawned as just another day of unbearable heat, very high humidity, and unceasing attacks on Cape workers from surviving mosquitoes, of which there were still uncountable tens of millions. A Bumper V-2, white with black markings, stood ready on a small launch pedestal on Pad 3 to take its place in history as the first rocket launched from Cape Canaveral. It had taken the place of another Bumper V-2, which had misfired on the launch pad days earlier. Photographs of the initial launch show just how much has changed since Cape Canaveral’s early days. Standing next to the Bumper V-2 was a painter’s tall metal-tube scaffold pressed into service as the rocket’s service tower. Mounted on rollers, it had three wooden platforms near its top that surrounded the rocket during pre-launch preparations, permitting access to the small upper stage. Just before 9:30 a.m. the rocket lifted off flawlessly. Another photograph shows several cameramen filming the event from what appears to be an impossibly close, and totally unprotected, position near the launch pad. Despite its strong start, the flight was a disappointment overall; the second-stage WAC-Corporal failed to fire.31 The launch nonetheless marked the start of a unique new enterprise, the American Space City.